My graduate project when I obtained my library and information science degree from UNC-Chapel Hill was to index a rap music magazine. I came up with controlled terminology, created a database, and indexed issues of The Source, one of my favorite rap music magazines at the time. I was an avid reader of the publication, had years worth of issues in my collection, and was frustrated that it was difficult to ever find any specific article I needed because no traditional indexing databases had comprehensive or detailed coverage.
Fast forward 20 years and I still LOVE creating indexes! There are so many records whose use would be made easier of there was an index. Sure, digitization and the posting of full-text materials are great and I am so grateful for all of them, but an index adds value because it can make locating specific content easier and it is easier to represent knowledge across the whole document (or set of documents).
Today, for example, I’ve been sharing online an update I’ve made to one of the indexes – an index of students graduating from Tennessee colleges & schools. In this update, I added about 300 students who graduated from Lane College, a historically black college in Jackson (Madison County), Tennessee. If you’d like to explore, you can visit it at www.tngenweb.org/ybook.
And this is just one of my projects. For the past 8-9 years I have created and/or facilitated several genealogy indexing projects and in 2019, my primary genealogy goal is to further develop them all. The others include:
- an index of students graduating from schools and colleges in North Carolina. I do this as a volunteer effort for the NCGenWeb Project – it is at http://ncgenweb-data.com/ybook/
- an index of names mentioned in newspapers from Tennessee and North Carolina. The TN index is at http://tngenweb.org/histnews/; the NC index is in flux right now, but currently, we have transcriptions online at http://ncgenweb-data.com/histnews/
- working on re-establishing an index of students & topics mentioned in newspapers from historically black colleges & universities. This is one of the projects we have going for the Nashville Chapter of the Afro-American Historical & Genealogical Society.
2019 – My Year of Indexing. I look forward to sharing more about them all throughout the year.